The daily grind: 9-10-13

The Daily Grind provides daily match-up advice for tinkerers and daily fantasy players. I welcome advice to help make this column more effective, including notice of impending weather events, new injuries, and changes to platoon situations. Ownership rates are from Yahoo!

The daily picks are a mixture of Daily League specific advice and information for the more typical fantasy owner.

Leave your playoff-related questions in the comments and I’ll help as best I can.

Today’s weather watch

The pleasant weather looks like it will hold up for another day.

Today’s grind

Tomorrow’s grind

Pitcher (to start): Scott Kazmir will face the Royals in the early game tomorrow. He’s 17 percent owned and has been showing great stuff all season long. His 4.17 ERA looks bad next to his 3.86 FIP and 3.58 xFIP. The story has been better fastball velocity (92.5 mph), a career best walk rate, and nearly one strikeout per inning.

After going through the numbers, it’s hard not to determine that Yusmeiro Petit‘s numbers may be legitimate. He’s showing an excellent walk rate and big swinging strike rate which has translated into plenty of strikeouts. Given his soft 88 mph fastball, I suspect that the league will adjust and the strikeouts will come down. He’s also a fly ball pitcher, so home runs could be a problem. Nevertheless, an elite walk rate can take you a long way. He’ll face the Rockies at home.

Zack Wheeler will be at home against the Nationals. Bryce Harper likely won’t be back in the lineup, so that’s another point in Wheeler’s favor. Unfortunately, he’s 48 percent owned, and almost certainly unavailable to those looking for playoff match-ups.

Sonny Gray has a nice pairing against the Twins. Gray’s shown an excellent arrangement of basic peripherals including a high ground ball rate, good swinging strike rate, and good walk rate (4.00 K/BB ratio).

Pitcher (bum): Eric Stults versus Roy Halladay is an interesting pairing. Stults has underwhelming stuff but solid results while Halladay is still trying to fine-tune his mechanics. Both sides might be useful for streaming.

Lance Lynn has struggled over the past month. Four of those six bad starts featured a problem with walking batters. The Brewers are pretty weak offensively, but could benefit from some patience.

Brad Peacock versus Brandon Maurer is likely to be a slugfest, even if the two offenses involved aren’t powerhouses. Maurer is not stretched out, since he’s filling in for Felix Hernandez on short notice. It’s likely to be a bullpen game for the Mariners.

About Brad Johnson

Brad is a former collegiate player who writes for FanGraphs, MLB Trade Rumors, The Hardball Times, RotoWorld, and The Fake Baseball. He's also the lead MLB editor for RotoBaller. Follow him on Twitter @BaseballATeam or email him here.

I think guys like EYJR are very useful in small dosages. You can’t run him out there all season. If you play him for 2 weeks and grab 5-8 steals and make up some ground in that category, he’s useful, while not doing major harm to your other categories.

Also, you could argue he’s more valuable to your team late in the year when you know which specific stats to target, while your ratio stats are affected minimally.

I agree with Brandon. It’s all about how you leverage him in your specific context. He’s going to basically zero out in HR and RBI, which can be very painful or not at all depending on a number of factors.

I’m having trouble deciding if you’re trolling or being serious. I’ve recommended EYJ for practically every start he’s made for 2 seasons for this exact reason. I’m just shocked to see a one category guy rostered in 35% of leagues.

The Ackley categorization was definitely lazy, I just lumped him with the other Mariners that I mentioned. He’s a decent play for R and AVG while he’s spraying line drives all over the field. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t really fit in the power or speed dichotomy that I set up.

I ran some numbers and the 35% ownership rate seems justifiable based on his auction value. As a general strategy, I strongly recommend against using SB-only players in 5×5 formats. The obvious exception is if you can gain points in SB or prevent point loss without losing more points in R/HR/RBI/AVG.

In the past, I’ve done some anecdotal tests on my personal roto totals and have always concluded that a player who posts $X of context neutral fantasy value over a season in multiple categories provides more net roto points than a $X player whose only positive category is steals.

AL only roto league. Trying to improve/protect my ERA and WHIP, while also maybe vulturing a win here or there. Won’t get into the specifics of the situation, but if you had a choice of Carlos Carrasco or an empty spot for the rest of the week, would you activate him? As a reliever, seems he’s been pretty good (11 2/3 IP, 1 W, 0 ER, 7 baserunners, 9K). And with guys like McAllister, Kluber, Kazmir, Salazar, thinking he may get a couple of opportunities for a long relief win. Worth a shot, or too much risk of a blowup in ERA/WHIP?

With the caveat that I haven’t watched him once this season, that’s way too much risk. His relief numbers look good because he has a .115 BABIP in that role. His peripherals look better, but they’re still quite mediocre. I wouldn’t take the risk unless you really need those wins.

Well, yeah, I really could use some wins – a win here or there could get me a point or two. And if he could actually be counted on to keep his ERA/WHIP strong in this role, he could help me get a couple of points in those categories too. But if it’s more likely he’ll blow up, then I’ll lose some points in those same categories, and it certainly wouldn’t be worth chasing a win…

Guess it’s just a question of whether we believe his pitching coach that these numbers are a result of his more aggressive approach in the ‘pen, or whether we believe it’s just luck…

He definitely has much better numbers in the role, but a ~7 K/9 and ~3 BB/9 is hardly elite relief work. The sample is much too small to draw any conclusions from, but his 3.71 xFIP as a reliever smells about right.